Shelly hates Japan. She hates the way it never feels quite comfortable or like home and she hates the way her fair hair and pale skin mean she's going to be stared at. That she's going to be the tall, big breasted blonde here whether she likes it or not. At least at home she's too athletic too qualify for the big breasted and she doesn't quite make tall at 5'8''. Here the guys stare and they don't even feel bad about it if she glares and calls them perverts.

The one thing Shelly hates more than Japan is the idea of going home, so here she is, teaching English pronunciation to junior high kids who get the fuck on her nerves and try to grope her when she's not looking. And maybe here is actually far enough, because it was either the other end of the world or a nunnery and Shelly's an atheist.

Some days it's enough to make her wish she had a machine gun and an excuse. Any excuse would do. Shelly's actually got an excuse right now in the form of some chick with the most affected sounding high pitched whine she's ever heard who seems to think Shelly is her new bestest friend. Anna or something and Shelly has no idea what Anna does but suspects she's some kind of hostess. Too damn much money from no where to be anything else.

"So, this guy comes around to see me all the time," Anna something is blathering, as if Shelly's killing glare is some kind of encouragement. "So nice! He's got this wicked cool dragon tattoo on his arm, and man, he keeps bringing me things, take a look!" Anna dangles her wrist a centimeter from Shelly's face and Shelly barely resists the urge to take a bite of flesh.

"Isn't it gorgeous? It's 24 carat gold! So soft!" Anna says.

"Yeah, great. How many times did you have to fuck him to get that?" Shelly growls. The guy who dragged her here, Ian Something the Canadian, blushes and looks away but Anna just giggles mindless. Fuck.

"Oh, I didn't! He just likes to talk to me, you know. You should come around my club sometime and meet the owner too, Shelly. A girl like you would do great," Anna says, dangling the bracelet again and giving a meaningful look to Shelly's threadbare jeans and faded white button down shirt, as if to suggest how great Shelly isn't doing now. Shelly growls again.

"Do I look like an idiot to you? If he's giving someone like you something like that and he's tattooed he's with the local mob. Fuck off." Shelly might have come to Japan without much planning, but she's not stupid and she actually reads and talks to people. She's damned well researched what mob or yakuza or whatever the fuck they call it here is supposed to look like when she realized she was going to have to be dealing with people like Anna.

"He is not! Well..." Anna grins and leans forward, like they're co-conspirators instead of an idiot and her innocent victim. "He did tell me he could hook me up, if I was into it. You know, a little-" She presses her pinkie to her nose and sniffs as if demonstrating her technique. Shelly resists the urge to whale her, but it's hard.

"And you're telling me this why?" Shelly manages through gritted teeth. A gun. She needs a gun. All she'd need to do was fire a warning shot.

"Cause, I heard about you. You like to party, right?" Anna pats her shoulder lightly and finishes her drink. It's got to be her fifth vodka tonic and probably explains a lot about how she's acting right now. Not that it's an excuse. "Tommy Martin says he knows you from NYU and you were wild there."

"Tommy who the fuck now?" Shelly repeats blankly, wondering if she's gone pale as she feels. Fuck. It's probably too dark to tell. Who is this Tommy guy?

"Tommy Martin. I met him working. He's on retainer for some company here and he says he knew you from NYU. Come on, Shelly. Come to the club. Eiji, the guy I'm telling you about, he gets us stuff you never even hear about in the States."

"Tommy... Martin. What the fuck are you doing talking about me to some guy named- I don't even know who you mean." Shelly's gone from white to pink.

Anna keeps drinking. "Seriously. Shit you have never heard of. Like, Eiji says he can score us this thing called WA. It makes you an animal. Seriously." Anna's got the most high pitched giggle in creation and being blisteringly drunk hasn't effected the plate like perfection of her make-up. She clearly will never shut up.

Shelly feels completely and utterly justified for grabbing her mostly full plate of something that had been described on the menu as fried eels and dumping it on Anna's head, with enough force to break the plate. This works. Anna squeals, jumps up, and runs for the ladies, still squealing. Something about blood.

Shelly dusts off her hands, drops her share of the tab on the table and leaves without saying goodbye. She's had enough of that NYU shit to never need to hear it again for the rest of existence. Too damn bad coming around the world hadn't gotten people to shut up about that.

She doesn't pay any attention to the uproar and the screaming because it doesn't even occur to her to do that until she realizes that it's not getting further away as she walks toward the door. Shelly turns around, back on her heels, every bit of nervous energy in her body making her buzz like she is high again. Just adrenaline.

Just in time. Something is coming at her. Some thing.

It's large and bulging and covered in some kind of fluid, fur, and the remains of Anna the hostess' slinky little dress. It's screaming like the world's on fire, screams mingling in with the sounds of other people running the fuck away. That's all Shelly has time to see before it's on her, long claws forward like a real hell bitch instead of whatever she'd assumed Anna was before.

Shelly kicks at its ribs, mostly on mosh pit crazy bashing trained instincts and she knows damn well that steel toed boots hurt like the end of the world, but the thing doesn't seem to feel it. Shelly can't say as much for herself and she screams when claws impact on her shoulder. It feels like a nightmare, like the kind she used to have when she was three and knew for sure there were demons in the closet and they wanted to eat her. It's got to be a nightmare or a drug flashback from what she took trying to make the nightmares stop when they didn't go away even though she was more than old enough to knew the damn closet was empty.

It was a nightmare because this kind of thing doesn't happen and it's dripping some kind of goop on her one good shirt and now she's bleeding and Shelly knows she can't afford a new one. Shelly howls in some combination of outrage and agony and kicks it again, harder because there is no way she's losing to a nightmare. No way. No way.

"Die, you fucker!" Shelly screams but it's coming at her fast and hard enough that she suspects that she's the one who might die here. Half way across the wrong end of the world, here in this country she hates. Here, an unofficial runaway from life. And she's going to die. She jumps back, barely managing to escape a swipe of the claws across her neck.

"No you fucking don't! Fucking whore, you aren't killing me!" And she doesn't know how but she has her hands on a chair, a metal one and she bashes the thing with it. It's still coming and this is like a horror movie, and why, why didn't she give into the temptation and just get a damned gun?

She must have closed her eyes for a moment, though she doesn't remember doing it. Fuck knows Shelly doesn't remember doing much. But she must have done that, because somehow there's even more of the monster goop splattering everywhere. Goop and something that feels and smells far too much like someone's insides and Shelly wants to scream and scream and never stop but she won't because there's some guy standing in front of her staring, his hands wrapped around the monster's neck, like he's just broken it in half. There's no world or nightmare bad enough for Shelly to get caught screaming in front of a guy.

"Sanzo?" the guy whispers, or something that sounds like that. Shelly stares and shakes her head, wondering if the thing hit her on the head and she's more confused than she thinks. The guy has golden eyes. Contacts. Right. He drops the body like its meat. Which it is, meat that seems to have exploded all over the bar. Words are buzzing in her ears, but Shelly thinks he says something like, "Sanzo? Anata wa iru?"

"What?" Shelly asks, more stridently than she'd meant to. "What did you say?" She could have sworn she spoke at least some Japanese two seconds ago, but there isn't a fraction of a word left in her head right now. And she has dead monster Anna goop all over a shirt she can't afford to replace.

The guy blinks and walks up to her, staring like she's the Mona Lisa and the Holy Grail in one package. Shelly back away, step by step and wonders why she isn't running. Probably because she refuses to back down for anyone.

"You speak English then?" he says softly, with only the hint of an accent. Shelly almost shakes her head before her brain unscrambles enough to make sense of that.

"Yeah," she mutters. She can do this. "I- yeah. I do. You do too, so that's a good start."

He nods, still staring. She thinks it's her hair he's staring at which is weird. With those eyes and how good his English is there's no way he's never seen a blonde woman before. "Yes. It is. A good start. I'm Goku. I- you look like the sun. I. Your name? Can you tell me?"

Shelly's starting to get over the shock just enough to wonder if this guy is trying to pick her up at the scene of a dead body but she feels too weird to think about it hard. Like there's something important she's forgotten that goes with demons in closets and golden eyes. She presses her hand to her shoulder and it comes away sticky and warm. Fuck, still bleeding. She sways on her feet.

"I'm Shelly," she whispers, and plops down onto a suddenly convenient chair, wondering how the hell the guy managed to get the chair behind her like that. "I can't say it's nice to meet you because it's not. And don't even start some ridiculous sun bullshit with me or I'll kick your ass from here to Manhattan." She shivers and reaches into her pocket for a reasonably unsplattered cigarette and lights it with hands that hardly shake at all.

"Okay. I won't." Goku smiles at her like she's just offered him a winning lottery ticket and hands her a beer that she doesn't ask where he got. Then he sits next to her in the middle of the most godforsaken mess Shelly has ever imagined just as if everything were suddenly okay. What does she know anyway? Maybe everything is.